February’s best feature is that there’s very little of it. (Can I get an amen?)

In this, it differs vastly from January, which begins with a hangover and ends with regret when all that Santa-shaped chocolate you were “hiding from the kids” has vanished and you’ve gained two pounds instead of losing six.

February is no less a miserable month but at least it’s short, and can practically be counted in hours. For instance, if you are reading this at noon on Monday, Feb. 10, then there are only 446 hours left in the month. If you’ve checked my math and it is wrong, please don’t send a letter to the public editor. She’s very busy.

The other bonus of February besides its brevity: holidays! Aside from Groundhog Day — and let me just say I have a real bone to pick this year with that rodent — there are two that matter in terms of the most important holiday factors: a) time off and b) chocolate (see above).

Ontarians’ time-off portion of February’s holiday allotment belongs to Family Day, a day when — admit it — you just sleep in and moon about in your pyjamas all morning, thinking that you really should go tobogganing but gosh, it’s cold isn’t it? Better to just cuddle up on the couch and binge-watch old movies on Netflix while microwaving the stuff in the freezer before the power conks out again.

Of course, the big February holiday (which conveniently this year shows up just in time for the long Family Day weekend) is Valentine’s Day. As we all know, this is the epitome of the Hallmark holidays, in which a bloody massacre immortalized in the opening minutes of the 1959 movie Some Like it Hot has been turned into a day filled with hearts and flowers. Something like that, anyway.

Over the years, like many holidays, Valentine’s Day has become all about guilt and the inability to get a dinner reservation at a reasonable hour.

So if you’ve got somebody to share the day with, be sure to feel guilty if it’s not perfect. If you don’t have somebody to share it with, feel guilty that, dearie, you’re disappointing your mother. If you’ve got small children, please buy at least 136 Valentines, preferably awash in sparkles/Disney characters/Batman and accompanied by gluten-free organic treats you have made from Gwyneth Paltrow’s recipe (price per bite: $13.95).

But hearts and flowers and Hollywood romances and (for lack of a better term) the mass media’s visions of love and other dangers rarely have much to do with the long-term reality of relationships.

It’s all very well for someone to lip-dub a video proposal or get themselves on the Jumbotron at the Rogers Centre or, I don’t know, get “Marry me” retweeted by Bruno Mars.

However, in the long run, all of those kinds of things are kind of irrelevant if they are not based on the generally unromantic nature of everyday life, especially in February when you can’t get the car out and are just stuck inside, looking at each other and watching the Olympics.

Big Greek Husband and I have been together for more years than I care to count (hint: more than Kim and Kanye, less than Elizabeth and Phillip). He is not always so great at the flowers and chocolate stuff but he is a decent guy and he makes me laugh and he’s got more patience with the kids than I’ve ever had.

And here’s the thing that you maybe won’t understand, but then again maybe you will; the most romantic thing he ever did for me was to clean dog poop off my shoes.

Bear with me here. I had left the shoes propped up outside on the porch, avoiding the icky task of washing them off. But after a day or two, there they were downstairs in the laundry tub, all clean.

So what’s romantic about that? Everything. It’s romantic because it was thoughtful. It’s romantic because he knew it would make my life a little bit better and easier and literally less messy. It’s romantic because he didn’t have to do it — I didn’t ask him to — but he did it anyway.

That’s the kind of thing that will keep you going, day after day, year after year and month after messy month, even in February when the chocolate’s already gone.

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